This forum was started in October 2003 and is distributed weekly to approximately 10 000 email recipients across the globe. Its purpose is to allow the exchange of ideas, tips, and advice for the purpose of aviation safety. Back issues have kindly been made available at http://efc.org.au/_sgt/m3_1.htm . Contributions are encouraged, and welcome.
Long story, with a lot of detail, but definitely worth reading.
At 11:20 AM, on a gray
and overcast January morning, I took off from
My route was going to be
direct all the way, relying on the handheld GPS to guide me nonstop to
I climbed quickly to
13,500 feet, my chosen cruising altitude, as per VFR guidelines. As I approached
the foothills of the mountains, the cloud layers seemed easily defined, with
bands of darker color separating those of the white cirrus layers. I continued
on, being able to maintain separation from the clouds and thinking I could see a
clear layer between cloud layers to navigate through. I passed the last airports
and towns west of the Sierra and knew that I was soon going to be committing
myself to crossing the mountains. I made frequent checks of the GPS map to keep
myself oriented as well as to define my escape route back to clear weather in
case I had to turn around.
With a 40 mph tailwind,
I was well over normal cruise speeds, moving at a speed of over 200 mph over the
ground. Within a few minutes, the layers of clouds seemed to suddenly merge and
lose definition. I looked up and could still see patches of blue sky straight
above me, but I had suddenly lost visual contact with anything around or below
me. I made a turn back to the northwest and toward clear skies, in no way
wanting to find myself in a cold milky soup of clouds only a few thousand feet
above dangerous and remote terrain.
I reached clear skies
quickly and glanced back to the east to see if there was another obvious and
clear way over the mountains. I was able to pick out definition in the distance
on a course a bit further north than my original one, and so I turned the plane
back to the northeast and pressed on. Yet once again, the definition of just
moments ago melted into a white blur as the cloud layers defied my visual sense
and I was once again in the soup.
And again, I could see
the sun filtering through the clouds above me, so I tried climbing to try and
quickly get above the cloud layer. I pushed the throttle and prop control to the
stops and pulled back on the yoke. I reached an altitude of 15,000 feet and I
was still engulfed in clouds; in fact, now I was in deeper than before, and with
the tailwind barreling me along at tremenous speed, I was suddenly two-thirds of
the way across the range, yet utterly blind to the outside world. It was at that
moment that I glanced down to the wing’s edge just outside my window and saw, to
my horror, a half-inch layer of ice solidly attached to the entire leading edge
of the wing.
I’ve been flying for
about 15 years now, and although I learned to fly in
The vision of that much
ice already having formed on the wings shocked me. I became irrational for a
moment. I made the immediate decision to turn around and go back precisely the
way I came, but in my unthinking haste, and not taking into consideration the
aerodynamic deterioration occurring at that very moment, I banked hard to the
left, bringing the plane into an almost 60 degree bank. Halfway through the turn
I glanced up at the airspeed indicator, my heart already pounding, and saw that
the needle was at 60 knots and winding down. Somehow, against all classroom
predictions of such a scenario, I managed to level the plane out and was able to
gingerly bring the airspeed back up. I may have even stalled, but as I think
back to that moment now, with ice accumulating at a terrifying rate on all
leading surfaces of the plane, in the middle of a 60 degree bank at 60 knots at
15,000 feet, I realize that those numbers should have been the recipe for my
destruction. I will never know why I was able to pull out of that predicament,
and I still lie awake at night imagining the plane spiraling down through the
clouds and impacting the rugged peaks of the Sierra.
But the epic was far
from over. I got the plane back on course, retracing my path exactly with the
help of the GPS. But now I was flying into a 40 mph headwind, and my groundspeed
waned first to 80 knots, then 75, then 70, then finally 68. I watched with a
kind of helpless terror that brought me close to tears as the ice continued to
accumulate on the wings, first an inch, then an inch and a half, then two, and
still accumulating. Very soon after my turn back to the west, I realized that I
was not able to maintain altitude. I let my airspeed dwindle down to about 95
knots and knew I could not let the plane fly slower than that. And against every
straining will, wishing the plane to remain aloft, I was forced to put the nose
down, losing about 500 feet a minute in order to maintain a safe
airspeed.
At this point I called
Flightwatch, whose frequency was ironically dialed into the radio, and told them
I was experiencing severe icing and needed a frequency for radar control. The
controller gave me
“Oakland Center,
Trinidad 21 Alpha Romeo, I’m experiencing severe icing conditions, I have about
two and a half inches of ice on my wings, I am not able to maintain altitude,
and need to get on the ground as soon as possible.”
The nearest airport to
me at that time was
It was in this highly
conscious, yet highly irrational state that I did something highly stupid. I
opened the small window flap next to me, reached out my arm, and tried to scrape
off the ice that I could reach with my bare hand. In the freezing air I clawed
at the ice but it was fixed as if part of the wing itself, fused through some
atomic network of chemical bonds. It was obviously futile. I pulled my arm back
in and saw that I had ripped off the entire fingernail of my middle finger, the
nail having pulled completely away from the skin beneath, shredding the skin all
the way down to my first knuckle, and hanging on only by a few strands of bloody
skin. Blood dripped down onto my pants. There was no pain at all, just a
fascination with my own stupidity and envisioning the forensic experts puzzling
over my bloody finger after pulling me from the wreckage that seemed more and
more likely to come at any moment.
With my chances of
slipping through the noose becoming thinner, I called
My head danced between
the GPS map, altimeter, airspeed indicator, and the wing. I prayed to a god I
never knew existed. My heart pounded in my chest with ferocity. Blood dripped
from my finger. I forced myself to breath slowly and focus. And then, as if a
new slide had been placed into a projector, I popped out of the clouds and
everything went from the grays of blindness to the whites and greens of a
mountainous winter. I was about 600 feet above the terrain, now having given way
to the gentler western foothills, and although I was still 8 miles or so from
the runway, still far from certain deliverance, a tremendous relief washed over
me. It was directly related to my sense of vision having been restored. Actually
seeing whatever fate awaited me, no matter the nature of its outcome, was like
the kiss of life. The thought of ramming into the side of the mountain in total
visual obscurity is many times more haunting to me than being able to watch it
happen.
I still had to clear a
few high ridges before I knew that I could make the runway. As I navigated
toward it, huge chunks of ice started breaking off from the fuselage and
slapping the windshield and other surfaces. The plane flew like it was in a vat
of glue, the controls heavy and sluggish and unnatural. I thought that maybe the
gear might be frozen and that I’d have to make a belly-up landing, but even that
thought was more comforting than the fate I’d been imagining a few moments
earlier. I saw the runway in the distance, cleared the last ridge by less than a
hundred feet, and knew I was going to make it. Only later did I read that most
icing-related accidents occur on approach. And only later did I learn to not
drop the flaps in a situation such as this. I dropped the landing gear and got
three in the green, and more relief poured over me. I dropped some flaps in and
felt the aerodynamics behave in a way I’d never felt before, like someone was
holding the wing-tips and fighting me with every control input I tried to feed
the surfaces. I told the controller I was going to make it before losing contact
as I approached field elevation. Despite the airplane behaving erratically and
sluggishly, I managed to maneuver the plane down onto the runway and made a
sloppy, shaky landing, and ran it out almost to the end before slowing enough to
taxi off.
The airport was
deserted. I parked, shut down, opened the door, and sat there for a moment,
shaking, savoring the overwhelming sense of relief soaking my body. I silently
thanked the
There was also ice on
the bottom of the plane and on the elevator control surface. I walked to the
small terminal lounge and found a payphone and called 911. By now, the pain in
my finger was starting to kick in pretty hard, and being an EMT myself, knew
that it needed to be properly cleaned and bandaged. Then I called my wife from
my cell-phone and told her what had happened, my voice shaking as I relayed the
story. “I don’t want you flying anymore,” she said through tears. “Get back to
The EMT bandaged me up
as I again relayed the events of the last half-hour.
A pair of EMTs arrived
in a fire truck to make sure everything was okay, and then all four of us went
back out to the plane so they could see the ice buildup. They were pretty
stunned by the amount of it, now half of it broken on the ground. I picked up a
piece and pondered its innocent state now compared to its earlier responsibility
for almost ending my life. The EMTs left and I was alone with my thoughts on a
cold gray afternoon with my original destination still many miles away. I
thought, reflected, and analyzed my options and decided to keep flying. By now I
could knock away all the ice accumulation, leaving a completely healthy plane
underneath. I took off uneventfully and navigated well to the south to avoid the
weather stubbornly hanging over the Sierras. I finally got around it all and
made the turn east, flew over Las Vegas, before finding myself in central Utah
in fading light with ominous clouds and dark patches waiting to greet me along
my intended path. Having cheated death once already that day, I made a detour
and landed at
It took me hours to fall
asleep, images of terror and helplessness flashing in my mind, playing out the
story if I had made any decisions differently, if I had indeed stalled out
completely when making that turn back, or if I’d been in a different plane, or
if I had kept on going, or if a million other scenarios. Finally, at 2:30 AM,
fatigue overtook my taxed body and I fell asleep.
The following morning
was temperate with a layer of broken clouds scattered along the horizon. I
refueled, took off, and spent the next two and a half hours navigating over the
Rockies, weaving my way through a labyrinth of thick patches of cumulus clouds,
before crossing the divide and dropping down onto the plains. A 35 knot wind
coming down off the mountains made for a jerky landing, but shutting down the
plane that afternoon, thus ending one of the most epic experiences of my life,
caused me to cherish every element of the world around me, to savor every
feeling and sensation, even the intense throbbing in my finger. My wife came to
pick me up, giving me a long, tight hug before we drove
home.
Flying is in my blood, the practice and expression of a deep longing to soar above the earth, and while I hope to keep flying for as long as I’m able, I’ll always remember how small and helpless I felt in the face of raw nature. The laws of nature allow for an airplane to fly and perform as it has been designed, yet in the time it takes to preflight, those same laws can rob the same plane of its airborne privileges. The challenge of the pilot is to discern between the two, to respect both, and to allow his passions to occupy the space in between.
It's very difficult for
me to say whether or not my not using supplemental
O2 had an effect on my
ability to function, but I can say that in those few tense minutes, I have never
ever felt as mentally sharp and as acutely aware of every sensory input. I don't
recall any fuzziness or clouding in my mind.
I don't know how long it
takes for the effects of high-altitude hypoxia to affect one's mental function,
but from the time that I was cruising along at 13,500 (an altitude I frequently
fly at with no ill-effects) to the time I was back under 10,000 feet was perhaps
ten, twelve minutes. I was just thinking today that the time it took to go from
a calm and rational state of mind to the terror of near-certain death was maybe
eight or so minutes. The entire episode, from when I first found myself in IMC
to landing at
Lori - yes, a part of me
was rather flabbergasted at the notion of actually getting back into the plane
and up again. But I reasoned it out. The plane was unharmed, the weather over
the field and along my alternate route of flight was clear, and being miles from
anywhere, I didn't really have much of a choice other than hitchhiking. Plus, I
just wanted to get back up - I recognized that with a different perspective, I
might avoid flying altogether for some time, but the incident was one dependent
on isolated factors. To me, flying has long been second nature, like driving a
car, something that every level of my cognitive and aesthetic abilities can
grasp, an extension of these abilities that feels entirely natural and
comfortable. That's probably what got me in trouble, but also what has allowed
me to enjoy flying as much as I do. When I got my first plane, the Arrow, I was
20 years old and spent three months flying it all around the US, just me and my
dog, sleeping in it, becoming very attached to it, and using it to explore every
nook and cranny I came across. I guess that kind of comfort in flying can easily
blur into complacency, a sense that I can just dip in and test the waters and if
it doesn't feel right, I can just get out. But of course some situations up
there don't provide that easy exit; some suck you in with even the most fleeting
attempt to investigate.
The experience will
certainly alter the way I fly forever - this I am sure of. Millard, I did check
icing forecasts, and icing was predicted for the mountainous regions of
In some ways, however, I
needed this experience very much, to be reminded of the power of both weather
and rash decision-making, as well as the surprising bonus of now cherishing
every beautiful breath, every sound, every kiss I share with my wife, and all
the people that have comforted me in these last few days.
Ryel
PS For whomever it was that asked, by all means you may use the story as a published article.
